History of ISC

ISC was established on January 1, 2000, to provide innovative and integrated registry, geomatics and information based products and services. On this date, ISC became the Saskatchewan Land Information Services Corporation, a Crown corporation responsible for the administration of the Land Registry system as well as the Land Survey, and the Geomatics Services. This change allowed for the consolidation of provincial government services previously offered across various departments and a Crown corporation.

The Land Registry originated in the late 1800s, when the Dominion Land Survey began. Before ISC, the Land Registry was administered by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice and Land Surveys was administered by Saskatchewan Property Management Corporation. Land was registered and titled manually at various Land Titles offices around the province.

In 1995, the Land Titles Automated Network Development (LAND) project began with the goal of re-engineering and automating Saskatchewan’s Land Titles and Plan Processing systems. This involved converting over 10 million documents and 50 million pages of records to electronic forms. When ISC was formed in 2000, it was given the responsibility to complete the LAND Project and to integrate Land Surveys and the Land Titles system with Geographic Information System (GIS) data.

Shortly after launching, the Company’s name was changed to Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan. The new name gave the Company greater flexibility to take on new products. In 2001, the Personal Property Registry (PPR) was officially transferred to ISC from the Ministry of Justice. ISC implemented a new online Personal Property Registry system in 2006. Following its success in modernizing both the Land Registry and PPR, ISC was awarded additional registry management responsibilities including the Vital Statistics Registry in 2008 and the Corporate Registry in 2010.

In recent years, ISC has sought to continue to diversify its service offerings to include ancillary information services to meet the needs of consumers and businesses. In 2008, GeoSask, a web-based portal enabling customers to access maps and geographic information related to land was launched. A second portal, Business Registrations Saskatchewan, was introduced in 2011. The Business Registrations Saskatchewan website streamlines all the steps required to register a business with the Corporate Registry, obtain a Provincial Sales Tax vendor's licence from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Finance and register as an employer with the Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) in one application. An additional partnership project was implemented in 2012, with the Mineral Administration Registry of Saskatchewan (MARS) for the Ministry of the Economy.

2013 was an exciting year for ISC, with the company undergoing significant changes. On May 30, 2013, ISC transitioned from a Crown corporation to a Saskatchewan business corporation. As part of the privatization, Vital Statistics was transferred to eHealth Saskatchewan. A few weeks later, on July 9, 2013, ISC became a publicly-traded company. The company is now publicly-traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the stock ticker symbol ISV.

Visit the pages below to find out more about the history of Land Titles and Land Surveys.